Theft of inventory is a common problem that occurs in retail stores. Small products are easy to hide in a shopping cart under larger items. With the growing popularity of self-checkout, such small items may be easily carried out of the store without being purchased, as larger items that have been purchased may simply be placed on top of the small items after checkout.
Another problem related to self-checkout is that it is manually intensive for the shopper, as items have to be individually taken out of the shopping cart, scanned and weighed before payment is made. Often, the help of store personnel is needed to complete a transaction.
Loss of inventory is another problem that is common for retail stores. As a shopper moves throughout a store, he or she may pick an item up from a shelf, place it in a shopping cart, but then take the item out of the shopping cart and put the item down on another shelf or another location in the store that is not near the shelf from which the item was picked up. Typically, such misplaced items are manually tracked by store personnel, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. The problem is intensified for perishable items, such as produce, because if the item is not found and put back on the appropriate shelf in a short enough amount of time, it cannot be sold.